1. Field of the Invention
The concept of a "process" is well known. In life, processes abound. Some are natural--as in the conception, gestation and birth of a child. Some are formulated and established by individuals in their daily lives--a person preparing for the start of a workday by going through a series of steps starting with awakening and ending with arrival on the job. A Process is a collection or series of related steps.
It is advantageous that 1) a process be comprised of consecutively performable steps; 2) the instructions on how to perform a process be a part of the Process1tself; 3) that a step be capable of holding documents; and that 4) when documents are stored in or removed from or altered during a step, the resulting documents are immediately available to all physically linked steps, which may include steps of other processes
The title of a step in a process should be the primary function to be performed and should preferably begin with a one-word action verb such as `submit . . . ` or `receive . . . ` or `gather . . . `. Further, as a user enters a step of a process, the user should have at hand any necessary documents, accumulated from set-aside documents of predecessor steps and documents found directly in the step about to be performed. It should be pointed out that a step of a process may be devoid of documents or contain `null` documents such that only the action provided by the step is necessary to accomplish the step. Such a step of a process might be: `Verify that the lights are on in the warehouse`.
If the documents of a step within a process are to be used by any steps within any other related processes, it is of great value to have the steps linked, so that the documents developed by one step are readily available to other linked steps without further physical movement of developed documents. In this sense, a Process is a collection of documents--multiply titled by action verbs, each of which represents an ordered step of a Process1n which said documents are acted upon.
2. The Prior Art
Process Management often involves the development of documents. A well-established approach of prior art is to focus on the efficient collection and organization of documents for ease of accessibility by the use of organizers, while the instructions on how to process such documents are kept separate from the documents themselves. A process management system is most often comprised of two separate major pieces; 1) the apparatus or the set of devices employed to develop documents and 2) the `how to` instructions or method(s) on how to employ the apparatus. Therefore, most often, a user must come to a process management with some prior instructional knowledge on how to perform the associated process or processes.